I’m not a beginner anymore, but I’m much less interested in technical tinkering for its own sake than I used to be. These days I just want my computer to work properly without too much intervention from me.
I’ve been using Kubuntu for a number of years, but I’m also hearing increasing complaints about how Canonical is running things. I don’t think I’m ready to switch to a new distro yet, but it wouldn’t hurt to know what’s out there.
Is Kubuntu still a good choice for an “it just works” KDE-based distro, or has it been surpassed?
Manjaro! I can’t run the KDE version myself, but I have both heard and seen good things about it.
I’ve been using Manjaro with KDE for a few years now. It works smoothly, I never ran into any issues with it.
The
pacmanpackage manager is pretty nice, too, I found it faster and easier to use thanapt-get, and the provided packages are always kept up-to-date. Updating the system (even installing a newer Linux kernel) is very simple and works reliably. So you always have the latest version of your apps, the kernel, and the DE.In the rare occasion that a program is not available in the official repositories or the community-maintained AUR, you can also install
snaporflatpakpackages.And since Manjaro is derived from Arch, you can use the Arch Wiki, which is very useful when you want to set up a database, use the android debug bridge, install another package manager, or do anything else less than trivial.
Yea this has been my main for almost a decade. It’s all of the benefits of running Arch without the painful install. And KDE Plasma 5 is pretty solid now that many bugs have been fixed.
EndeavourOS is probably good too, I haven’t tried it, but it seems similar. People who don’t like Manjaro seem to prefer it.
I’ve been running The KDE version of Manjaro for a couple months now I love it. I’m still pretty new to Linux, but setup was easy and pretty much everything has worked right out of the box.